New Music

Music can be live or recorded, it doesn’t matter how it finds us. What matters is if it has the ability to stir us, make us think and make us feel. We search for the different, the new, the inspiring, the upcoming and the underground. If it makes our knees tremble with excitement and our skin shiver with pleasure, we’ll share it.

Pipe Guy is one of Adelaide’s most famous street musicians. Though, instead of heading to the city’s Rundle Mall with a guitar, this guy sets up a set of PVC pipes and a pair of flip flops to play for the masses. What kind of music can pipes and flip flops create?

Holy Holy is the musical collaboration between singer/songwriter Tim Carroll from Brisbane and guitarist/composer Oscar Dawson from Melbourne. The duo have a story of serendipity and spontaneity. Meeting as English teachers in Asia, they later recorded their first Holy Holy songs in Europe. Their debut single, Impossible Without You, was soon on rotation on national broadcaster Triple J. Since their success, Holy Holy has now released another single, History. This is the Secret Playlist that influences the duo’s sound.

Bertie Blackman, the eclectic Australian alternative singer/songwriter, is out with a new album this year titled Run For Your Life. Her latest video continues in typical Bertie-style with a clear 80s synth pop aesthetic. Bertie told us what inspires her diverse sound in her Secret Playlist.

It’s undisputed that the Gibson Les Paul is one of the most recognizable guitars of alltime. Artists who play the Les Paul seem to dominate each era and musical genre. From heavy metal to indie rock to reggae, here are a list of 5 musical legends that have strapped on a Les Paul and rocked out like we wished we could with its signature sound.

Going solo for the first time, POND frontman Nicholas Allbrook recently released his debut album, Ganough, Wallis and Fatuna, through Spinning Top Records. Before flying solo, Allbrook was in a string of bands: POND, Mink Mussel Creek, and Tame Impala, among others. This is Allbrook’s Secret Playlist, written in his own words.

Troye Sivan, South African-Australian singer and actor, became famous for his YouTube channel. Winning a Teen Choice Award for Best Web Collaboration, Troye and Tyler Oakley’s Boyfriend Tag video landed nearly five million views. Although Sivan continues to be a successful YouTuber, his music career is well underway with his first single Happy Little Pill out through Universal/EMI. What inspired the sound of his new album? Check out his Secret Playlist below.

In NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, the typically over-autotuned T-pain was unusually stripped down and raw. He sang three well-known songs, starting with the most popular, Buy U A Drank followed by Up Down (Do This All Day) and Drankin’ Partna.

Aphex Swift. Yes, you read that right. It’s a mashup of songs from Aphex Twin’s Richard D James Album and Taylor Swift’s 1989. This thoughtful collision was created by David Rees this past summer. It’s either blasphemy or brilliant and I think I kinda like it.

Legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain has just had a not-so-punk, rare ‘mixtape’ from 1988 unearthed recently by Dangerous Minds. Further contributing to music history, this strange tape was supposedly put together by the man of grunge just one year before the release of Nirvana’s 1989 debut album, Bleach.

You know you’re in the presence of true musicians when they’re playing amazing music despite their throats and tongues being on fire. The Danish National Chamber Orchestra, led by their conductor and Danish Chili Pepper enthusiast ‘Chili Klaus’, decided to eat some of the world’s hottest pepper while playing classical music.

Having created a massive buzz on Soundcloud, and now more recently on Australian radio, Golden Features create dark, electronica music paired with incendiary visuals and a mysterious frontman. Sydney’s ‘masked producer’ has announced a headlining tour in late 2014, traversing three countries. This year, with nearly half a million listens on SoundCloud, Golden Features was nominated as Best Breakthrough Producer at the InTheMix Awards. We got the inside word on what inspires the Golden Features sound in his Secret Playlist below.

Sonnymoon is the collaborative venture of musicians Dane Orr and Anna Wise. Their creative journey into experimental pop music began in 2009 when frontwoman Wise and producer Orr began making music together after meeting at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Their collective aesthetic is eclectic, a tad hipster, but above all, totally unique.

In the video below, German vocalist Anne-Maria Hefele demonstrates a technique called ‘Overtone singing’, wherein she simultaneously sings multiple notes at once. Having practiced this technique for more than 10 years now, Hefele manages to sing a low note and a high-pitched scale at the same time, even moving the notes in opposite directions.